Small Software Companies: The other side of the coin

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Mar 7, 2007 at 09:41 PM

Phil,

You make some good points, but overall I have to disagree with the major thrust of your post. I’ve worked in customer service related positions in two companies, and I can tell you that customers are ALWAYS nitpicking, whether you’re selling bicycles or software or whatever. That’s just the nature of consumerism, I think.

I agree that there are times when people make unreasonable requests. I’ve seen that on some of the forums you’ve alluded to, but a developer with a good sense of his or her product can easily brush them off. For example, check out the Personal Knowbase forum. The two people who seem to be principals of that little company have a very specific idea of what PK is and kindly but firmly reject suggestions from users which don’t fit that vision.

Smart developers learn from their customers to make their products better and more competitive. David Michael, the developer of The Journal, is very actively involved with the Yahoo Forum for his software, fielding questions, taking suggestions and learning quickly about bugs that need fixing. David and Marck, the developers of Brainstorm, have a similar approach… they don’t seem to fear or resent feedback at all.

In fact, bigger companies in other fields probably envy the ability of software developers to get this kind of immediate feedback.

As for unreasonable expectations, I’d say that we users are more forgiving than you give us credit for. Just look at Zoot users. We have had a ton of patience waiting for the 32-bit version of Zoot to come out. But Tom Davis, Zoot’s developer, earned our trust and patience by creating a great product, and supporting it with superior responsiveness to the end user’s feedback. Everyone understands he’s a one-man shop, and few, if any, complain about how long this process has taken.

The complaints (or rants) you’ve seen on this site relate primarily to gross mis-use of our trust and good will. I don’t care how small your company is, or how much pressure you’re under, you don’t take people’s money without providing the product. And if you don’t intend to respond to customer questions and comments, then don’t start a forum or provide a customer support e-mail address on your website.

I participate in many forums for software, and I rarely see the kind of crazed criticism you talked about. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but it is not common with the software I follow. In fact, where I see the most negative comments is with the products from the bigger software companies (not big, like Microsoft, but bigger than the one- or two-man operations), companies like MicroLogic and AskSam. I think this happens because people, in fact, do expect more from these companies and are more forgiving with the companies that are smaller.

Steve Z.